storytimewithjoe | Beaten down by the season (Reply)

OK, it’s official. I clearly must be KalEEforniyan now. Not because I spend all my spare moments in a tanning salon… not because I eat tofu… and NO, I have never gotten injected with any neurotoxins, thank you very much! Rather, I have become one of those people who gets uncomfortable when it rains – wiggy even.

Heck, I think back to all of the blinding rainstorms I went through in Florida. Every 4:00 in the afternoon, the skies turned Armageddon-black, and it wasn’t unusual to see funnel clouds here and again. Heck, as long as I didn’t live in a trailer-park (the understood magnet for tornados), all was well, right? It wasn’t anything to drive through blinding rain, dodging the occasional branch or barrel that nature decided to spew before my moving vehicle. It built character! But right now, the non-stop rain that we have had for days on end has me down. Why? Well, because I just can’t escape it – even indoors.

You see, we live in an old house. Old houses have a lot of character. The architecture is so much more interesting than slap-it-together modern buildings. The space and grandeur reflects a sense of status and etiquette that seems in so many ways to have gone the way of the dodo. But the insulation is… well… it isn’t. So when it is cold and damp and drafty outside, it is that way inside. Here in (normally) sunny SoCal, that isn’t a problem. The gorgeous weather that we have outside is the gorgeous weather we have inside. But right now, the outside weather is in with us. And, just to add some special holiday challenges, the weather has thrown a couple of additional wrenches into the works. Back when restoration in the Claycomb began, one of my hubby’s first projects was to have the entire house rewired. Given that the first couple of months in the house involved running extension cords through the windows, indoor electricity seemed like a great idea, right? So he hired an electrician. And we are now concluding that said electrician must have been on crack! We have one particular circuit that has always been a challenge. Too many things on at once would blow this one particular breaker. And this week, it has been acting up. But finally a couple of days ago, it went. We cannot flip the breaker back into an on-position. And what does this breaker control? Most of the electricity in the back parlor… most of the electricity in the dining room… and (for no particular reason whatsoever), the dishwasher. Um… WTF??????!!!! With all those breaker switches, what EEEEEEDIOT puts so much on just one????? Apparently our idiot. So… we now have an appointment with an electrician.

But wait… there’s more!

As I got ready for work this morning, I began walking down the front stairs when I noticed, to my horror, a big brown patch in the corner of the ceiling over me. WTF??????! A leaky ceiling coming from the attic. WHHYYYYYYYYYY??????!!!!

The first thought that came to mind was, “when it rains, it pours”. Quite literally.

If anyone is trying to reach me over the next couple of days, and I’m not getting back to you, it will be because I am out building an arc.

This is NOT fun!